RN01 is a simple, functional desk built for focus. The form is clean and balanced, with sculpted legs that taper and flow into the frame—shaped by hand to bring a sense of movement and lightness. It’s made from solid ash with a natural oil finish to highlight the grain. The design avoids ornament, focusing instead on proportion, texture, and honest joinery.
About the project
This desk, titled RN01, marked the culmination of a three-year journey through the Fine Woodwork, Furniture Design & Making Diploma at the Building Crafts College in London. The experience was not only an education in traditional joinery or precision, though we worked to tolerances of a tenth of a millimetre, shaping chairs, cabinets, and even scale staircases by hand, but something more personal and enduring.
Designing the desk in Fusion 360 allowed me to test ideas in a virtual space, explore joinery, proportions, and function before a single piece of timber was cut. Yet it was in the quiet repetition of building, of planing, chiselling, assembling, that I felt a deeper purpose reveal itself. This wasn’t just a final project. It was a way to bring together what I had learned, both technical and intuitive. The course had always been, at its heart, about learning to think and feel in three dimensions, to translate thought into form, and form into something I could touch, use, and understand.
In the end, building this desk wasn’t simply a requirement for graduation. It was a reaffirmation of why I chose to make in the first place.
